VSL Cloud Compute

Are you ready to move onto the Cloud? Here at VSL we can help.

We offer customers the secure and reliable Amazon EC2 solution.

VSL Cloud Compute is a cloud service based on virtual servers from which you can run your normal business applications. These virtual servers are provided as a direct alternative to the traditional on-premise or data centre hosted servers and are accompanied by appropriate storage, security, and networking facilities.

Cloud Compute can best be described as ‘Infrastructure as a Service’ (IaaS) whereby your business does not own, manage or maintain any of the underlying hardware. You simply manage your traditional applications without concerning yourself with the resources needed to support the applications themselves.

IT is changing – servers and storage are now a utility like electricity and water and many more companies are deciding to move to the Cloud.

Small and medium-sized companies will find Cloud Compute an attractive proposition because VSL has simplified the buying options and removed the need for you to configure the service yourself. We also offer an optional audit to ensure what’s built is sized appropriately and configured correctly.

Simplicity is the key – we look after everything for you and if you need more capacity at any time we can make moves and changes as required. We can also offer assistance in creating a migration plan for your organisation at your convenience to ensure the whole process is simple and hassle-free.

Thousands of organisations trust us with their voice, mobile and data services and now, working in partnership with the largest public cloud infrastructure service in the world, Amazon Web Services, we can also manage your servers, storage and provision your firewall rules for you.

Amazon EC2 enables you to increase or decrease capacity within minutes, not hours or days. You can commission one, hundreds, or even thousands of server instances simultaneously. Because this is all controlled with web service APIs, your application can automatically scale itself up and down depending on its needs.

You have complete control of your instances including root access and the ability to interact with them as you would any machine. You can stop any instance while retaining the data on the boot partition, and then subsequently restart the same instance using web service APIs. Instances can be rebooted remotely using web service APIs, and you also have access to their console output.

You have the choice of multiple instance types, operating systems, and software packages. Amazon EC2 allows you to select a configuration of memory, CPU, instance storage, and the boot partition size that is optimal for your choice of operating system and application. For example, choice of operating systems includes numerous Linux distributions and Microsoft Windows Server.

Amazon EC2 is integrated with most AWS services such as Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), providing a complete, secure solution for computing, query processing, and cloud storage across a wide range of applications.

Amazon EC2 offers a highly reliable environment where replacement instances can be rapidly and predictably commissioned. The service runs within Amazon’s proven network infrastructure and data centres. The Amazon EC2 Service Level Agreement commitment is 99.95% availability for each Amazon EC2 Region.

Cloud security at AWS is the highest priority. As an AWS customer, you will benefit from a data centre and network architecture built to meet the requirements of the most security-sensitive organisations. Amazon EC2 works in conjunction with Amazon VPC to provide security and robust networking functionality for your computer resources.

How does it work?

Prior to migration to the cloud, we will offer an optional audit and detailed report of your existing on-premise infrastructure to ensure that your new virtual environment is a perfect fit for your business. You may also take this opportunity to implement a healthy refresh and/or upgrade for some of the applications themselves. Either way, Cloud Compute has been designed to make the transition to cloud as simple as possible for your business.

So, once the virtual servers have been chosen; in terms of the optimum number of CPUs, memory and storage capacity needed for the applications themselves; the servers can be provisioned rapidly and securely.

This includes all the required connectivity options such as public internet, firewall rules, private subnet and more, just like a traditional on-premise environment, with options for load balance, virtual private network access and backup.

Once this is all securely setup, the service can be commissioned and the applications installed and your data migrated – a process that is simply determined by the size of the applications and amount of data that your business needs to be uploaded.

If your organisation is a large one, depending on circumstances, it’s quite common practice if you decide to phase your migration to the cloud with some application servers remaining on premise or in a data centre for a period of time. In this ‘hybrid’ environment, you can integrate both environments to support your business and then migrate the remaining elements as and when required.